Weather Banter - View Single Post - Meteorologists! Stop it! There is no hectopascal.

David Ball · July 7th 03, 11:04 PM posted to sci.geo.meteorology

On Mon, 7 Jul 2003 20:58:06 +0000 (UTC), (David
Blanchard,,,) wrote:

In article , R. Martin wrote:
Gene Nygaard wrote:

IMO David is correct. For ease and clarity of communications,
especially among professionals, the professionals doing the
communicating should, as they always have, choose the units.
It is a convention, perhaps less formal than SI, but a manmade
convention none the less, and nothing is sacred about any of them,
including SI, as long as they do the job.

Many years ago, a colleague gave a seminar discussing a flash flood event.
He mentioned that the rainfall rates from these storms were XX inches/hour,
then backtracked and, with a wink, give them in SI units of meters/sec.
Very useful number in the first form, totally useless in the second. And
the original value could have been given in cm, or mm, or m per hour and
still been usful.

Sometimes SI units get in the way of communicating information.

Canada went metric decades ago. I can go into any supermarket
in this country and find produce sold by the pound and the kg. For the
grocer, the goal is the sell the produce. For the customer, it is to
figure out how much X amount of produce is going to cost them. At the
end of the day, that is what is important, not what the unit is.
Standards are laid out, not to be draconian, but to offer precision.
If your KG is different than mine, there is a problem. They should
never be used as a way of restricting communication.